Syntactic analyses

Manzini & Franco (2016) propose that DOM and datives are not just mor- phologically, but syntactically identical. The core of their proposal is that DOs with DOM and IOs are both sisters of the same head, a preposition they term P(⊆) (or Q(⊆) if the element is an affix).

Manzini & Franco (2016: 211–215) characterise these heads in infor- mal semantic terms, suggesting that they express an “inclusion” or a “part- whole” relation, and that they are related to possession.17

Manzini & Franco (2016) also suggest that syncretism of dative and accusative in Romance pronominal systems instantiates the same overlap. 17 _{Manzini & Franco (2016) reference similar proposals, like Harley’s (2002) P}

loc head, spelled out as to in the English prepositional dative construction (see also Pesetsky 1995;

Beck & Johnson 2004). A potential problem for this approach, at least for Spanish, is discussed by Cuervo (2003), who argues that datives in Spanish are not PPs.

(73) illustrates this for Italian. The verb parlare ‘to talk’ takes a dative object, while colpire ‘to hit’ takes an accusative object. This distinction is marked with third person arguments in (73b,c), but the cases are syncretic in first and second person.

(73) Italian (Manzini & Franco 2016: 209) a. Mi me / ti you.sg ha has.3sg colpito hit / parlato. talked ‘He hit/talked to me/you.sg.’

b. Lo he.acc / * gli he.dat ha has.3sg colpito. hit ‘He hit him.’

c. Gli he.dat / * lo he.acc ha has.3sg parlato. talked ‘He talked to him.’

Manzini & Franco (2016: 210) suggest that the syncretism with first or second person is not morphological, but that the objects of both parlare and colpire are structurally represented as datives, i.e. as in (73c).

They adopt Svenonius’s (2002) proposal that accusative and dative case are related to the way a predicate structures (sub-)events. Svenonius (2002: 197) proposes that accusative is assigned when two subevents overlap and dative when they are distinct, and discusses a range of different classes of verbs. Manzini & Franco (2016) adopt this distinction and argue that in Italian a third person accusative, e.g. the object of colpire ‘to hit’, is syntac- tically a D, while a third person dative, e.g. the object of parlare ‘to talk to’, involves a D head embedded under Q(⊆). They suggest that such a dative structure can be paraphrased as “I caused him to be on the receiving end of some talk.” (Manzini & Franco 2016: 216).

Manzini & Franco (2016) further propose that first and second person pronouns must be embedded in the dative structure (involving Q(⊆)), in- dependently of the predicate. This suggests, of course, that to hit me has a different event structure than to hit him, because the former, but not the latter, is based on the dative structure. Manzini & Franco do not spell out what this difference is, however:

There is no a priori reason why an argumental frame includ- ing a Participant internal argument should reflect a complex

organization of the event with verbs like ‘hit’ in [(73)]—while the embedding of a 3rd person argument does not in [(72a)]. However the lexicalization patterns of Italian suggest that this is exactly what happens. DOM datives are no morphologi- cal accident—nor do they reflect morphological regularities. They arise in the syntax and they reflect a slightly different structuring of the event structure with Participant internal argu- ments. (Manzini & Franco 2016: 218, emphasis mine).

Without specifying the semantic effects of the “slightly different structur- ing” of subevents, Manzini & Franco’s (2016) argument w.r.t. to the struc- tures shown here is essentially morphological, as they suggest that it is the “lexicalization patterns” of first and second person arguments which moti- vate representing them as datives in (73).

Discussing why DOs and IOs do not behave alike under passivisation, Manzini & Franco (2016: 219–220) then suggest that indirect objects are embedded under P/Q(⊆) because of selectional requirements of the pred- icates they are an argument of, while DOM DOs require P/Q(⊆) because of their referential properties (e.g. animacy and specificity). Merging IOs under P/Q(⊆) is thus obligatory and happens under passivisation, too. The authors attribute the impossibility of passivising indirect objects to their “in- herent case properties”, which make them unavailable for movement and promotion to nominative.

This acknowledges the fact that passivisation is possible for DOs with and without DOM and this means that even DOM arguments are not obli- gatorily merged with P/Q(⊆). Manzini & Franco (2016: 220) propose that an LF constraint rules out first or second person objects inside VP without Q(⊆): a way to escape this constraint is to move such arguments outside of the VP. This is exactly what happens under passivisation, although Manzini & Franco (2016) do not make it clear what exactly happens to the P/Q(⊆) head. They conclude their discussion of the distinct syntax of IOs and DOs with respect to passivisation by stating that the “parallelism between ac- cusative and DOM depends on the fact that they are both structural cases (not selected by the verb) assigned VP-internally” (Manzini & Franco 2016: 222).

While Manzini & Franco frame their argumentation in semantic terms, they do not provide independent evidence of how the relationship between the predicate and its theme arguments with and without DOM differ seman- tically and in what way the former resemble indirect objects semantically or syntactically. Their proposal of how to capture differences in passivisa-

tion introduces an additional constraint to account for asymmetries between direct and indirect objects, but again, it lacks independent motivation.

6 Conclusions

In this paper, I proposed that homophony of differential object marking in dative case in a number of languages, e.g. Spanish and Hindi, is due to syn- cretism of accusative and dative case. I presented evidence in favour of this hypothesis from these and other languages which showed that direct objects with and without DOM pattern together with respect to their syn- tactic behaviour, while indirect objects show different syntactic behaviour. A number of different tests across languages, as well as language-specific evidence supports this view. This set of data aimed to show that the syntax of direct objects with and without DOM is different from that of indirect objects.

I further argued that the semantic properties that affect the distribution of DOM, e.g. animacy, need not affect the distribution of dative. Direct objects with DOM also differ from indirect objects in their semantics. Simi- larly, I showed that certain predicates allow recipient arguments to behave like direct (or primary) objects, showing DOM, being able to passivise, etc. This supports the idea that one internal argument of the verb is assigned structural accusative case (or a primary object function) which correlates with certain syntactic and semantic properties.

I provided a morphological analysis of this syncretism based on under- specified spell-out rules, and supported by independently motivated pat- terns of case syncretism. This morphological approach provides a straight- forward explanation of the homophony of DOM and dative in the languages under discussion and is compatible with their distinct syntactic behaviour.

Abbreviations

1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, abl = ablative, abs = absolutive, acc = accusative, caus = causative, cl = clitic, dat = dative, def = definite, DO = direct object, DOA = differential object agreement, dom = differential object marking, erg = ergative, f = feminine, fut = future, gen = genitive, inf = infinitive, ins = instrumental, IO = indirect object, lat = lative, loc = locative, m = masculine, n = neuter, neg = negative, nom = nominative, obj = object, p = patient-like argument of a canonical transitive verb, pass = passive, pfv = perfective, pl = plural,

pst = past, ptcp = participle, r = recipient-like internal argument of a di- transitive verb, sbj = subject, sg = singular, t = theme- or patient-like in- ternal argument of a ditransitive verb.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the support of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund Grant No. 118079 (PI Katalin É. Kiss). A number of people checked and/or dis- cussed data from several languages with me: I want to thank Afra Pujol i Campeny, Víctor Acedo-Matellán, Ane Odria, Luis López, and Anna Pineda for Spanish, Rajesh Bhatt for Hindi, Ane Odria for Basque, Arkadˊij Lon- gortov, Eszter Ruttkay, Katalin Gugán and Márta Csepregi for Khanty, and Olimpia Squillaci for Palizzese data. I am also grateful to audiences in Cam- bridge, York, Brno, Leipzig, Vienna, and Budapest, and London for com- ments. Finally, I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their con- structive and extremely helpful comments which no doubt improved this paper. All remaining errors are my own.